In a typical cellular radio system, wireless terminals, also known as mobile stations and/or user equipments (UEs), communicate via a radio access network (RAN) to one or more core networks. The radio access network covers a geographical area which is divided into cell areas, with each cell area being served by a base station, e.g., a radio base station (RBS), which in some networks may also be called, for example, a “NodeB” (UMTS) or “eNodeB” (LTE). A cell is a geographical area where radio coverage is provided by the radio base station equipment at a base station site. Each cell is identified by an identity within the local radio area, which is broadcast in the cell. Another identity identifying the cell uniquely in the whole mobile network is also broadcasted in the cell. The base stations communicate over the air interface operating on radio frequencies with the user equipment units (UE) within range of the base stations.
In some versions of the radio access network, several base stations are typically connected, e.g., by landlines or microwave, to a controller node, such as a radio network controller (RNC) or a base station controller (BSC), which supervises and coordinates various activities of the plural base stations connected thereto. The radio network controllers are typically connected to one or more core networks. The connection between nodes and networks is typically created using one or more transport networks.
The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile communication system, which evolved from the second generation (2G) Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). The UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN) is essentially a radio access network using wideband code division multiple access for user equipment units (UEs). In a forum known as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), telecommunications suppliers propose and agree upon standards for third generation networks and UTRAN specifically, and investigate enhanced data rate and radio capacity. Specifications for the Evolved Packet System (EPS) have completed within the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and this work continues in the coming 3GPP releases. The EPS comprises the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN), also known as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access, and the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), also known as System Architecture Evolution (SAE) core network. E-UTRAN/LTE is a variant of a 3GPP radio access technology wherein the radio base station nodes are directly connected to the EPC core network rather than to radio network controller (RNC) nodes. In general, in E-UTRAN/LTE the functions of a radio network controller (RNC) node are distributed between the radio base stations nodes, e.g., eNodeBs in LTE, and the core network. As such, the radio access network (RAN) of an EPS system has an essentially “flat” architecture comprising radio base station nodes without reporting to radio network controller (RNC) nodes.
Carrier class telecommunication equipment is supervised via one or several monitoring functions. The two most basic methods for such supervision are fault management and performance management, the latter often standardized by organizations such as 3GPP to create a common method and principle for measuring the performance of a particular node type across different vendors.
The performance is characterized by using performance indicators (PI) —often called counters, counting events of a certain type on a certain device or part of the node, or counting amount of data of a certain type transported through a certain part or function of the node. An example of such a counter in an LTE radio base station (“RBS”) is a counter that counts the number of successful attempts for a user equipment to attach to a radio cell. The performance indicators can be other than a counter, e.g., a performance indicator may be more complex. Examples of performance indicators also include histogram counters that can aggregate distributions, individual events, sets of events, fault information, aggregated fault information, etc.
The devices or functions that have associated counters are typically those parts that carry some form of payload. For a radio base station it is typically the radio cell or the node as a whole that has several counters defined. Also non-physical entities may have counters.
The prime example of a type of such virtual objects is the neighbor cell relation. The neighbor cell relation is a relation defined by a set of from-cell/to-cell descriptions. Each such description specifies that when the UE is served by a from-cell it should also monitor the signal strength of the to-cell, and the radio base station will use this information to evaluate which cell will provide best service for the UE. If the result of this evaluation is that the UE is best served by another than its current cell, the RBS will order the UE to switch serving cell—a process called hand-over. An important part of the radio service is to maintain the services while the UE is moving, and thus to successfully hand-over a UE to the most appropriate cell as the UE leaves the area for its currently serving cell. As a consequence it is important that the node is configured with the best possible neighbor cell relations, and depending on radio technology used the neighbor cell relations can refer to quite many neighbor cells for each cell on a node.
In order to evaluate the neighbor cell configuration of a node each from-cell/to-cell pair is equipped with a number of counters. Since there may be hundreds of such from-cell/to-cell pairs for each cell the amount of counter data produced by an LTE RBS will to a large portion (60-80%) consist of neighbor cell relation counter data.
The counter data is written to file at even periods for retrieval and post processing in a management system. One of the post processing operations done is to calculate Key Performance Indicators (KPI) based on the rather huge set of PI data retrieved from the node. The calculated KPIs, providing a condensed view of the nodes performance, are later aggregated over time to further reduce amount of data stored and to provide per hour, day, week or longer aggregated variants of these KPIs.
In the current solution all raw PI data is transported “as is” to a management system for several purposes:                Calculation of KPI values, where the results are stored as reports or new counter values        Storage for later usage for . . .                    export to offline optimization and planning tools            trouble shooting a dip in a KPI            calculation of trends on selected PI values            comparing trends before and after a configuration change has been applied to the network                        
A significant amount of raw data is transported from every node in the radio network to the management system only to be used once for calculation of KPI data and then stored for a potential future usage. A majority of the PI data is never again used as the derived KPI data indicates that all is fine in the network.
With rapidly growing networks in terms of number of nodes and amount of PI data per node, the already severe problem of transporting and storing the PI data and calculating the KPI data becomes even worse.